A project calling itself YaCy – pronounced "ya see" – aims to break Google’s headlock on the search market by giving away an open source search engine that can be used both online and within an intranet.
The YaCy engine is based on peer-to-peer connections rather than search queries being run thorough a central server. Users …

Looks interesting but might give it a couple of months before installing their peer software juuuust incase they haven't secured it as well as they'd hoped. Installing a web server that someone else has created on one of my machines is something that can wait until other people have learned any hard lessons that might be lurking out there.

Blocked

Google is a stupid name...

Title "Optional"

Again, interesting, use it along side other search engines, and who knows, albeit, my Internet connection is slow as fuck, so to quote B.A from the A Team "I pity the fool who depends on my connection"

I suggested something very similar this to Google on 10th June 2010...

...and they never got back to me!

"Would it be possible to write either a Chrome plugin or make an addition to the Google Toolbar that allows you to click a button that indexes the current page you are viewing and uploads to google servers. Obviously safety measures would have to be put in place to stop people clicking the button too much and clogging up the system but it could be a revolutionary new approach!"

El Reg Who?

Just installed it on an old machine and the big problem I see staright away is that it takes 30-60 seconds to load the results page?!?

And when it does finally get their the results are less than impressive. A search for our favourite tech new site and it doesn't appear on the first page of results, even if some people might argue what the register page of imgur.com is more important but we know better!

On google it's the first result of the first page .... (just saying) ... maybe by watching what I search for they know what I want? I guess this software could learn as well, but not a great out of the box experience.

Not surprised

I thought about trying to do what YaCy is doing years ago*, but I don't see any practical way to do it with existing hardware and connections. How big is Google's index? Petabytes? Maybe more these days? Even if you can distribute that to enough different systems, how do you give everyone access to that data fast enough to make it usable? A huge part of Google's engineering effort seems to go into making their server farms able to process that data and get it back to the user. And that's with data centers they can control and optimize. How do you do that with flaky internet and crappy, spyware-crippled systems that most users have?

While I think the concept is great, I just don't think it will work well enough. I'd love to be wrong and if they pull it off it will be an immense triumph, but I don't see it happening.

*And I'm sure I wasn't the first or the smartest to come up with the idea, so the fact that it hasn't been done yet lends credence to the rest of my post IMHO. As do the experiences reported in teh comments so far.

With every new development...

...google functions less like a search engine and more like a "you typed in something but never mind, why don't I give you links for unrelated stuff that other people like" engine. If YaCy can establish itself, I think there could be an opening for a search engine which searches for what you ask it to search for, doesn't shove ads in your face, and doesn't agree to censor content on behalf of dodgy governments.